James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  “A huge cast of actors and extras were sitting around during one of the customary long waits while electricians work on the lights. Suddenly there occurred one of those complete silences which inexplicably descends on a large group of people … out of which Spence’s voice boomed over a microphone, ‘This is all your fault, Selena. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be driving a truck in Milwaukee and happy.’

  “I replied that he might have been driving a truck, but he wouldn’t have been happy.”

  Just four days into the run of The Rugged Path, another hotly anticipated show made its New York debut. State of the Union was the first new play in three years from the team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and only the second to follow Life With Father, the phenomenal Broadway stage hit that was still playing to capacity houses six years into its run. A sharp topical satire, State of the Union followed the presidential aspirations of one Grant Matthews, an idealistic and self-made industrialist who proves too wayward a candidate ever to win an election. Caught between a wife, a mistress, and a perceived duty to the nation, Matthews ultimately decides the price of public office is too great to suit his iconoclastic nature. As a commentary on the public mind-set of postwar America, it was everything The Rugged Path was not—slick, funny, popular with both critics and the public, and the winner of the 1945–46 Pulitzer Prize for drama. If Tracy ever peered around the corner from the stage entrance of the Plymouth Theatre and envied his friend Ralph Bellamy the jackpot he had so decidedly hit with the part of Matthews, he never let on, other than to openly covet the movie role when the rights were sold to Paramount in May 1946.

  The playwrights were powerful enough to insert casting approval into their contract with the studio, and when first Gary Cooper, then Ray Milland proved out of reach, the property passed to Liberty Films, Inc., and the most ideal of all American directors to tackle the subject—the inestimable Frank Capra. Tracy campaigned for the part, and within a month of Capra’s involvement he was considered a lock, even as Liberty continued to dicker with M-G-M. “I’m getting old,” Tracy explained laconically, “and I’ve never done a picture with Capra.” Predictably, the sticking point became the price Metro would exact for the loan of one of its most valuable stars. As when Clark Gable was borrowed by Selznick for Gone With the Wind, the studio demanded the distribution rights to the picture in addition to a fee of $175,000. For its part, Paramount contributed the play and the services of Claudette Colbert. The net result from Tracy’s standpoint was the best role, the best material, and the best director he had had in years.

  At first it was thought Cass Timberlane would be delayed in favor of State of the Union, but with Tracy on board, Capra undertook a complete rewrite of the script to strengthen the character of Matthews, who would no longer vacillate under the competing influences of the play’s supporting characters. The final shape of the picture owed as much to circumstance as design, Tracy’s own involvement, however ideal, being the direct result of the playwrights’ inability to deliver Gary Cooper and Paramount’s subsequent willingness to surrender the property. The secondary part of the wisecracking columnist Spike McManus, first assigned Robert Walker, went to Van Johnson when Walker fell ill, Johnson, Angela Lansbury, and Lewis Stone all being M-G-M contract players. Shooting commenced on September 29, 1947, so the film could be in theaters well before the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1948—a contractual stipulation as well as a commercial imperative. The only non-M-G-M personnel in the cast would be Adolphe Menjou and the aforementioned Colbert, who would be appearing opposite Tracy for the first time since Boom Town.

  Tracy ordered six new suits for the picture—three predictably gray, three blue. (“Spence owns plenty of suits,” Larry Keethe observed, “but you can take my word there’s not one suit among them that isn’t blue, gray, or brown.”) The first days of production were given over to introductory scenes with Kay Thorndyke, the conniving daughter of old Sam Thorndyke, a dying newspaper baron, and McManus, their star employee.

  Tracy joined the shoot on October 8, playing the first of several intimate scenes with twenty-one-year-old Angela Lansbury, an awkward circumstance given the nature of the role and Lansbury’s extreme youth. “We had a very tricky scene to play in which I was his mistress,” she remembered. “Spence understood that I was a very young woman who had been cast in this role of a woman probably fifteen years older than I was. And he instinctively knew my sense of not quite knowing how to play this scene with him, which was in fact almost a love scene. And he was extraordinarily sensitive to that fact and helped in every possible way he could to make me feel at ease and not have any sense of embarrassment.”

  The quality of his cast was such that Capra effortlessly pulled ahead of schedule and was ready for Claudette Colbert a full week before her scheduled October 17 start date. The early call wasn’t a problem for Colbert, forty-four, but working after five o’clock was, the actress being so famously fastidious over the way she was photographed that she refused to show the right side of her face to the lens and reputedly knew more about staging and lighting than some of her cameramen. She had a brief confrontation with Capra in his office (“My doctor says I get too tired—”) and walked out on the picture when the director who guided her to her only Academy Award–winning performance refused to be limited to a seven-hour workday. “Oh my God!” blurted Sam Briskin, one of Capra’s partners. “Everybody’s on salary! Could cost us a fortune—”

  Capra’s boldness came in part from the fact that he was several days ahead of schedule, but the replacement of Claudette Colbert with a star of equal magnitude was essential to keeping the picture on track. Briskin called L. B. Mayer, Eddie Mannix (who, according to Capra, cheered the decision), then Tracy himself, whose first reaction was to laugh. When the project first landed at M-G-M and Tracy was officially confirmed as its star, there was widespread speculation that Kate Hepburn would join the cast, since Colbert was presumed to have been left behind at Paramount. She was reported to have just arrived on the coast—this was March 18—to do a Screen Guild broadcast and prepare for Metro’s adaptation of the John P. Marquand novel B.F.’s Daughter, which was to be produced by Edwin Knopf.

  Then something happened. In May, Hepburn garnered a lot of attention when she appeared at a rally for New Republic editor Henry Wallace at Los Angeles’ Gilmore Stadium. Wallace, the former vice president and future Progressive Party candidate for president, had been denied use of the Hollywood Bowl. At Gilmore, a venue arranged on short notice, he drew a crowd of 28,000, among them Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona, Edward G. Robinson, and Hedy Lamarr. Hepburn, dressed in a sweeping scarlet gown, struck out at the Thomas-Rankin committee investigating Hollywood in Congress and all but stole the show with fiery talk decrying an atmosphere of official intimidation toward the movie industry and the arts in general. “The artist since the beginning of time has always expressed the aspirations and dreams of his people,” she thundered. “Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have.” She went on to denounce President Truman, Attorney General Tom Clark, and State Senator Jack B. Tenney, among others, as responsible for a “plot” to foist “thought control” on the “liberal and progressive people of America.”

  “I was backstage because I had some involvement in the meeting,” Ring Lardner said, “and she seemed nervous just about speaking in public on politics, rather than nervous about endorsing Wallace … But she went ahead and made a very good speech.” Hepburn created such an indelible impression that the afternoon Hearst paper described a “scarlet robe, and it was plenty scarlet,” reflecting “in red” the “yogi’s [Wallace’s] philosophy.” George Stevens, who later positioned her politically as a “liberal New England conservative,” suggested her appearance that day was not so much out of support for Wallace or in service of Communist or socialist sympathies but simply because “she got mad when they wouldn’t let him use the Hollywood Bowl.” Hepburn herself always said that she was speaking agai
nst censorship, not particularly for Wallace, and that it was “the speech that almost ran me out of the business.” Nobody could remember exactly what Wallace said during his half-hour address, but the Progressive Citizens of America later claimed to have distributed more than three million copies of Hepburn’s talk, which was titled, aptly enough, “Thought Control.”

  Unofficially branded as “pink,” Kate didn’t work at all that summer, and when Metro announced that she and Tracy would be teamed for another picture, Hedda Hopper took care to print a reader’s suggestion: “I hope Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn won’t be starred for the fifth time in Before the Sun Goes Down. Hepburn couldn’t stand being called ‘box-office poison’ twice.” It was then reported that Hepburn “had a real peeve on” because M-G-M gave the lead in B.F.’s Daughter to Barbara Stanwyck (who was presumably safer, politically, because she was known to be a Republican). Hepburn had, in fact, been idle nine months—people were reportedly throwing things at screens showing Song of Love—when Capra made the admittedly heated decision to let Colbert go her own way.

  “What the hell happened?” asked Tracy as he took the director’s call. “Goddamn you, I’m going to report you to the Actors Guild.” Then he laughed: “You told that Frankie Froggie Colbert to go to hell, did you?”

  Capra asked if he knew any actresses, any “friends” who weren’t working, and, as calculated as the question now seems, claimed to have absolutely no one in mind when Tracy responded, “The Madam! I’ve been rehearsing my part with her, she’s taking Colbert’s role, at home here.” Capra’s response: “My God, do you think she’d do it?” And Tracy’s reply: “I don’t know. She’s kind of nutty that way, about people being in trouble. She’s ‘theatre’ you know.”

  Hepburn took the phone and, according to Capra, said, “Sure! What the hell? When do we start?” She then, as she later remembered it, called Colbert herself. “Claudette I knew,” she said, “and I called Claudette and I said, ‘You know, they’re just going to dump you and take me, because here I am and they’re paying me. And I don’t care what hours I work, and I think you’re wrong to say you have to quit.’ And she said, ‘Please, just do the part, because I …’ That’s how it happened.” Capra was amazed: “No contract, no talk of agents, money, billing—nothing. She worked day and night, all through the weekend, with the costume designer, Irene … I don’t know anybody in the business who wouldn’t have held us over a barrel for money—and we would have paid anything to save the picture.”

  Colbert’s exit took place on a Friday, and Kate stepped into the role of Mary Matthews the following Monday, thus ending Spence’s moratorium on further Tracy-Hepburn pictures little more than a year after he first proclaimed it. The irony of Hepburn’s portrayal of the spurned wife with two children could not have been lost on those in the know, Lansbury’s Kay zeroing in on Grant in much the same way Hepburn had targeted Tracy. “We all knew,” Lansbury said, “but nobody ever said anything. In those days it wasn’t discussed. They were totally hand-in-glove, totally comfortable and unself-conscious about their relationship. She wasn’t the sort of woman that many men would be attracted to—the snugly, cuddly woman in the movies at that time. And yet because of her enormous affection and love for Spencer, she had the ability to subjugate this almost manly quality she had at times and become this wonderfully warm, irresistible woman.”

  The first scene between Tracy and Hepburn was one in which the estranged couple must share a bedroom in Menjou’s “boarding house for political has-beens.” Lansbury has deliberately left her glasses on the nightstand. Mary finds them and starts transferring bedding to the floor, Grant protesting her apparent decision to sleep there until she crawls into the bed and leaves the boards to him. Dissolve to the two of them in semidarkness, Mary peering down at her estranged husband from atop the mattress, Grant pensively puffing a cigarette below. She wonders if she has lost him for good, asks him if he wants a divorce. He scratches the back of his neck thoughtfully, winces at the directness of the question.

  “The world thinks I’m a very successful man—rich, influential, happy,” he says. “You know better, don’t you Mary? You know that I’m neither happy nor successful … not as a man, a husband, or a father. You wanna know something else? I’m glad I’m down here on the floor. That’s where I belong …”

  Tracy was energized, engaged on State of the Union, tearing into the part of Matthews with renewed vigor and imagination. Similarly, Hepburn brought a deft balance of humor and pathos to the role of Mary, taking up the slack even as Capra, beset by business worries, grew distracted and oddly unsure of himself. “When Tracy and his ‘bag of bones’ played a scene,” said Capra, “cameras, lights, microphones, and written scripts ceased to exist. And the director did just what the crews and other actors did—sit, watch, and marvel.” Angela Lansbury saw it as a spiritual melding of two supremely talented people: “Their personalities as well as their talents were orchestrated so marvelously. I began to think of them as one person, really; I suppose most people did.”

  Scarcely a week into Hepburn’s tenure on the picture, the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities got under way in Washington with windy testimony from Jack Warner, L. B. Mayer, and the Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand. There followed a host of “friendly” film industry witnesses, the first of which, director Sam Wood, fingered Hepburn as having appeared at a recent meeting—apparently referring to the event at Gilmore Stadium—at which “Hollywood Communists” had raised $87,000. The next day, Adolphe Menjou, the first of the big-name actors to take the stand, seconded much of what Wood had said, stopping short of directly accusing specific people of being Communists, but noting that many “acted” like Communists, among them John Cromwell, Paul Robeson, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Henreid, and Alexander Knox.

  State of the Union (1948). (SUSIE TRACY)

  Tracy disapproved—as did Gable—of marquee names muddling around in politics (“Remember, it was an actor who shot Lincoln”), but Hepburn had no such qualms and promptly aligned herself with the Committee for the First Amendment, an ad hoc organization of Hollywood heavyweights that included Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Eddie Cantor, Myrna Loy, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Rita Hayworth, and director William Wyler. The cornerstone of their collective effort to combat the grandstanding of Chairman J. Parnell Thomas and the eight members of his committee (which included Congressman Richard M. Nixon) was a broadside that characterized the investigation as an attempt to “smear” the industry and called the hearings “morally wrong” because “any investigation into the political beliefs of the individual is contrary to the basic principles of our democracy; any attempt to curb freedom of expression and to set arbitrary standards of Americanism is in itself disloyal to both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution.”

  Menjou, who had been cast as the hard-boiled Conover, Capra’s Washington kingmaker in State of the Union, was affiliated with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a rival group of virulent anti-Communists and right-wingers that counted John Wayne, George Murphy, Walt Disney, Ward Bond, and director Leo McCarey among its more outspoken members. The dapper old character actor, who had first worked with Hepburn in 1933’s Morning Glory, was regarded as something akin to a ticking time bomb on the Capra set. “Scratch do-gooders like Hepburn,” he was once heard to say, “and they’ll yell Pravda!” To which Tracy countered: “You scratch some members of the Hepburn clan and you’re liable to get an assful of buckshot.” Tracy tolerated Menjou largely by ignoring him, while Kate found him merely ridiculous. The atmosphere on the stage was tense but cordial, everyone seemingly committed to bringing in the picture on time and, if possible, under budget.

  “Bob Thomas worked for the AP and he always did good stories on the stars,” Emily Torchia recalled.

  Not gush, but he never went after them either. On State of the Union, Bob started to interview Adolphe Menjou and I thought, “Isn’t that nice?” because usually,
you know, they just want the stars. And I didn’t hover, I walked away. The next day there was a terrible headline. Menjou had said something terrible about Miss Hepburn. You know, it was an awful time politically with McCarthy, and Menjou attacked her terribly. Oh, I almost lost my job. Mr. Strickling said, “How could you? How could you have walked away?”

  “I can’t face them,” I said.

  “Well, you have to,” he said, and he walked me down to the set. Miss Hepburn and Mr. Tracy, they were both so quick to say, “Emily had nothing to do with it.” And in that situation, Mr. Tracy never raised his voice.

  Cass Timberlane opened at the Music Hall on November 6 and was a big hit with the matinee trade, the Armistice Day upsurge carrying it to an outstanding first week total of $145,000. Variety took its commercial appeal for granted, declaring Lana Turner’s itchy performance as Jinny Marshland “the surprise of the picture” and noting that Tracy was made to “look wooden by comparison.” Turner overshadowed Tracy in most of the reviews, turning the pulpy material into something of a breakout. Enthusiasm for her work in the picture drove domestic billings to nearly $4 million, making Cass Timberlane only marginally less successful than Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a remarkable circumstance given the film’s listless pace and its unconscionable length.

  The West Coast opening came amid an unusual amount of fanfare. The Kappa Kappa Gamma Alumnae Association sponsored a benefit premiere at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre for John Tracy Clinic that included a short film explaining the clinic’s mission.

  Listening Eyes was principally the work of Walt Disney, who funded the short for $12,000 and contributed its director, Larry Lansburgh. To control costs, students at the USC School of Cinema crewed and helped with sets, and the color stock was donated by Ansco. “He has been very much interested in our Clinic because he has known John since he was a little fellow and was on our original Board of Directors,” Louise said of Disney, “and yet it took him five years to get around to ‘allowing’ that maybe he could make a picture about us.”